Striking gold ... Dickens’s bound copies of All the Year Round.
Photograph: PR

In a lucky coincidence that would not look out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, an antiquarian book dealer has stumbled across what is believed to be Dickens’s own personally annotated copy of a literary periodical he edited. The find reveals, for the first time in around 150 years, the names behind 1,500 anonymously authored pieces in All the Year Round, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Wilkie Collins.

Dr Jeremy Parrott acquired a 20-volume set of All the Year Round last September, from an online bookseller in north Wales, believing he had bought a rare, deluxe-bound version of the weekly magazine, in which Dickens serialised novels including his own A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, as well as a mix of fiction and non-fiction by unnamed authors. Opening it in December, Parrott discovered pencil annotations in the margin.

The offices of All the Year Round in Wellington Street, Covent Garden in London. Photograph: PR handout

“Then I saw Henry Morley, Wilkie Collins, Mrs Linton … then the second or third volume I opened had a Christmas story in it, and looking in the margin of the Christmas story, I thought, hang on, this isn’t just a name, this is Dickens’s signature. And that was the ‘oh my God’ moment, when I thought this isn’t just an annotated set, it is Dickens’s own set.”

Parrott described himself as “enough of a Dickens scholar to realise this was a huge find, even as an annotated set: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of contributors who remain unidentified today”.

But “this would have been Dickens’ personal deluxe set, where he recorded all the contributors he commissioned over a 10-year period,” he believes. “I imagine him in a few idle moments in a working day, sitting there and writing who wrote what in the previous month’s issues.”

Parrott tracked down the provenance of the volumes: they had been acquired from a private house sale in Wrexham. He showed them to Dickens experts, including leading scholar Michael Slater, and John Drew, founder of Dickens Journals Online. The latter, Parrott writes in a paper to be published by Victorian Periodicals Review, “likened the experience to deciphering the Rosetta Stone – a moment of utter revelation”.

Slater, emeritus professor of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College and past president of the International Dickens Fellowship, called Parrott’s find a remarkable discovery, adding that “it’s not certain that all the annotations are in Dickens’s hand, though some certainly are”, with others possibly “by some of his staff working on the journal”.

“The fact they are authentic is the most exciting thing,” he said. “This is the file set, probably kept in the flat Dickens had above the office of the periodical.” Slater speculated that after Dickens’s death, “it is quite likely they got sold off … and as it’s a very handsome looking set, people didn’t bother to look inside, and it ended up in the antiquarian book trade”.

“It’s a huge deal,” he said. “Jeremy Parrott struck gold.”

Parrott said his set shows that a number of pieces that have been attributed to Collins, author of The Woman in White, are not actually by him, and that seven or eight pieces that were not suspected to be by the author are in fact his work. The volumes also reveal that Mrs Linton, considered the first professional female journalist in Britain, wrote well over 100 pieces for All the Year Round, and that Elizabeth Gaskell penned two literary essays for the periodical that have not previously been attributed to her. In total, he believes, the annotated volumes reveal the names of hundreds of contributors for the first time.

Dickens’s sons Sydney and Frank are also shown to have published articles in the journal, both of them at no more than 17 years of age. Slater also highlighted the pencilled annotation of one “Aunt Margaret”.

“All contributors are identified by the name of the author, but some are just identified by Aunt Margaret. That’s very interesting – one of the novels Dickens serialised was called Aunt Margaret’s Trouble,” said Slater. That work was by Frances Trollope, married to Anthony Trollope’s brother, and sister of Ellen Ternan, the young actress with whom Dickens was involved.

“Instead of writing Fanny Trollope as the name of the contributor, he writes Aunt Margaret, as though he’s deliberately disguising the fact that this is Ellen’s sister,” said Slater, who in his book The Great Charles Dickens Scandal unpicks the details of Dickens’s relationship with Nelly Ternan. “I think he’s disguising the fact he pays her a pretty good rate, because he doesn’t want it known.”

Robert Moye, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, said the journals “shed a whole new light on the material we have in our collection relating to Dickens’s life as an editor and champion of so many significant Victorian writers”.

“The journals also illuminate Dickens’s connections both professional and familial; the revelation that Dickens’s sons and son-in-law were contributors was particularly surprising,” he added.